One phrase I kept hearing over the past year or so has been, “He hasn’t been through a crisis yet. What happens then?” Well, I think the chaos in Syria, abandoning our best ally in the Middle East, the Kurds, high and dry and then having no plan to deal with the aftermath which is the massacre of innocents qualifies as a crisis.
The average Trump supporter won’t care. Of course, they don’t. They don’t have anything left of what we would call a soul. They think this is nothing. It’s over 7000 miles away. How could it hurt us?
Osama Bin Laden attacked us from farther away.
This is a full-blown international crisis. This is an attempt at genocide. This is an attempt at genocide by a people who have perpetrated a genocide before on innocent Armenians near the end of World War I. If the moron-in-chief had read any history, (hell, if he had seen this one movie) he would have understood what would happen right after he pulled out of northern Syria.
Now we see Trump in a crisis and it ain’t pretty. Exhibit One, the letter…
By the way, this is so short I really don’t care about fair use. Also, it’s Trump, so…
Exhibit Two: Quotes from his latest news conference.
Referring to the Kurds:
“And Syria also has a relationship with the Kurds -- who, by the way, are no angels. Okay? Who is an angel? There aren’t too many around.”
“The thing that’s common is that everybody hates ISIS. Now, the PKK, which is a part of the Kurds, as you know, is probably worse at terror and more of terrorist threat, in many ways, than ISIS.”
So, when was the last time we were attacked by the PKK? We know the last time we were attacked by ISIS.
The piece de resistance of this conference, however, was this little gem.
"It's a lot of sand. They've got a lot of sand over there so there's a lot of sand that they can play with"
Exhibit Three: The photo
You can find it on Speaker Pelosi’s twitter feed.
Look at the three men to the right of Trump, heads bowed, brows furrowed, realizing during this whole meeting that they should’ve taken that retirement package months ago. They look about ready to vomit, which leads me to this:
The person in the lower left, who I believe is a Democratic member of the House, is smirking. This reminded me of the great film “Monster in a Box” by the late great author, actor and monologist Spaulding Gray. This is his final monologue from that great film, where he documents writing his “monster” of an opus, “Impossible Vacation”, and performing in the Broadway production of “Our Town” as the stage manager. It seems apropos.
Often, when you do a long run of a play, in this case Our Town, you have what I like to call a unifying accident, in which something so strange happens in the play, that it suddenly unites the audience in the realization that we are all here together at this one moment in time. It's not television. It's not the movies. And it probably will never be repeated ever again. It happened as I was speaking of the dead and I say, "And they stay here while the earth part of them burns away, burns out....They're waitin' for something they feel is comin'. Something important and great...." As I say this, I turn and gesture to them, waiting, and, just as I turn and gesture, the little eleven-year-old boy playing Wally Webb projectile vomits! Like a hydrant it comes, hitting some of the dead on their shoulders! The other dead levitate out of their chairs, in total shock, around him and drop back down. Franny Conroy, deep in her meditative trance, is slowly wondering, "Why is it raining on stage?" The little boy flees from his chair, vomit pouring from his mouth. Splatter. Splatter. Splatter, I'm standing there. My knees are shaking. The chair is empty. The audience is thunderstruck! There is not a sound coming from them, except for one little ten-year-old boy in the eighth row. He knows what he saw and he is LAUGHING!
At this point, I don't know whether to be loyal to Thornton Wilder and go on with the next line as written, or attempt what might be one of the most creative improvs in the history of American theatre. At last I decide to be loyal to Wilder and simply go on with the next line, and I turn to the empty chair and say: "Aren't they waitin' for the eternal part of them to come out clear?"
Spaulding Gray, “Monster in a Box”, 1992
Aren't we all waitin' for the eternal part of them to come out clear?